But what's happened in the subprime debacle is more like a meatgrinder, where the risk of hard to predict mortgage defaults has contaminated whole batches of securities.
Just one year ago, many on Wall Street had written off Provo, Utah-based Novell, Inc. (NOVL) as yet one more piece of dead meat for Bill Gates meatgrinder.
In a controversial 1999 decision the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York held that Hobart Corp. was liable for failing to put a warning label on a meatgrinder in which an employee lost his hand.